Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Laramie thought she was familiar with the case, though she didn’t remember the spy’s name offhand.

“Among what he was caught selling in the Pentagon-FBI sting that snared him,” Knowles said, “were certain lists. He generally sold his findings nonexclusively-sometimes selling copies of the same document to six or seven different countries-and the most damaging of the lists he sold revealed hundreds of undercover operatives’ true identities. The document I thought might apply to your ‘ICR’ question, though, was a handwritten list of secret Pentagon file names. Not the files themselves, but their titles and whereabouts.”

Rothgeb jumped in.

“Once Wally mentioned the case,” the professor said, “I remembered a prosecutor with the Justice Department I’d sat on a panel with, who told me he’d been a part of the investigative team assembled by the prosecution. With some assistance from our friend in the room next door-”-Rothgeb jerked a thumb toward her guide-“I was able to reach him around three this morning and get the necessary approvals to have a look at the document Wally’s talking about. Anyway, here it is. One page of it, at least.”

Rothgeb turned over the piece of paper he’d been keeping under an elbow on the table and pushed it over to Laramie.

She saw on the page-which appeared to have been faxed-a carefully handwritten, page-long list of what she presumed to be file names, running alphabetically from the last of the Hs through about twenty I listings. A sequence of dates followed most of the file names, with a final entry on each line denoting, from what Rothgeb was telling her, the file’s location in the Pentagon.

Nine lines down from the top of the page was the file name ICRS, PROJECT, which Laramie took to be the alphabetical listing for something called “Project ICRS.”

When Cooper’s baritone voice charged into the room through the speakerphone, everyone jumped before remembering he had been listening in.

“Reading aloud,” he said, voice distorted by the encryption, “would be helpful.”

Laramie explained what Rothgeb had just given her.

When Cooper didn’t say anything else, Rothgeb said, “‘ICRS’ could stand for just about anything, but we did some brainstorming, and if you consider the notion of R & D relating to the first airborne iteration of a filovirus-in other words, one with wings-it might not be a bad guess to translate ‘ICRS’ as ‘Icarus.’ I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of Icarus-and if this was a Pentagon-funded lab doing the research, the irony of our military flying too close to the sun for its own good is palpable. Either way, this document specifies the location of a file in the Pentagon-at least the location of the file at the time this attaché was giving away national security secrets-and it looks like a pretty tight match with our operative’s three-letter discovery near the lab in Guatemala.”

“Might take some juice to dig up the actual file,” Knowles said, “but so far, it does seem as though our squad has some serious cider at its disposal.”

Laramie looked up from the document.

“We done for now?” she said.

Knowles and Rothgeb said nothing for once-but each man swiveled his head to look over at Cole. Cole, meanwhile, sort of reanimated-Laramie thinking that was the only word for it as, with a slight movement of his jaw, the cop came alive from his place in the chair by the door and said, “We’ve identified six probable sleepers.”

Laramie stared.

“Jesus,” she said after a while. “When you guys bury the lead, you really bury it. You’ve been holding out on me since last night?”

“Yep,” Cole said.

“Good news, huh?” Knowles said.

“Great news-I think,” Laramie said. “You said ‘probable’-that you’ve ID’d six ‘probable’ sleepers. What do you mean by ‘probable’?”

“The six probables,” Cole said, “are six cases of identity theft. In each case, the assumed identity is that of a person who died young, approximately thirty years ago. In each case, the identity assumed by the sleeper has been in evidence-in other words, there’s been documentation of the current version of the identity, for about a decade, give or take. Same as with Achar.”

“We also have images of each of them,” Knowles said, apparently unable to contain his excitement, “in some cases stills, in some cases video, taken at a time that approximates or precedes the assumption of the new identity. Each of the images was captured while its subject was located right at or very near the straight-shot entry points refugees typically take when they’re able to make it here by boat from Cuba.”

Rothgeb said, “Those routes have mostly dried up, primarily due to the increased aggression of U.S. immigration policy, but that was not the case ten years ago.”

“Anyway,” Cole said, “they’re ‘probable’ because we haven’t exactly knocked on their doors and looked around for racks of filovirus serum. It could be there’s no connection at all, but in our view that’s unlikely. There are too many matches with our criteria.”

Christ, Laramie thought, we may just turn out to be qualified for this gig after all.

She realized as this thought occurred to her that in one significant way, their job was all but over. They had now accumulated enough intel to push things up and out of their reach: she would have to take a closer look at their research, but it was time to offer the whole plate of goods to Lou Ebbers.

Time to take her “cell’s” findings to her “control”-presuming her guide hadn’t already updated the man top to bottom. Regardless, it seemed to Laramie that Lou Ebbers-and whoever he was working for-was about to have some tough decisions to make.

She took in a breath and let it out slowly, refocusing on the discussion at hand.

“Why don’t you show me what you have on these six people,” she said. “I assume you’ve got a working file with the scoop on each.”

Cole reached over to the bed, lifted the manila folder he’d been keeping there, and gave it a Frisbee toss to the table. It skidded over to Laramie.

“Scoop enclosed,” he said.

The spiderphone was in use again.

Laramie’s guide had deployed the bizarre-looking contraption on the bedside table in her room. As before, its red indicator light was illuminated.

Laramie sat alone in the room with her guide.

“So where are we?” came the static-ridden and otherwise distorted voice of Lou Ebbers over the spiderphone.

Laramie continued to appreciate the no-nonsense approach of her new boss: do your job, give me my answers. Good. She liked it that way.

“Where we are,” Laramie said, “is we’ve reached a decision point.”

She’d filled him in earlier on Castro’s theme park, so Laramie launched in with the identities of the six probable sleepers. Then, feeling more or less like a teaching assistant to her former professor, she laid out Rothgeb’s earlier lecture, providing Ebbers with all criteria, factors, and suppositions her team had incorporated into the “public enemy equation,” as they called it afterward, including Cooper’s discoveries of the Guatemala facility and its adjoining village of death.

She offered up her “counter-cell’s” conclusion that the Salvadoran president and perennial thorn in America’s public relations hide was their man. She made sure to cover Raul Márquez’s background, which she assumed Ebbers already understood-but even if he did, as the “prosecutor” making her case, Laramie wanted to emphasize the point to her boss that Márquez’s genocide-survival story explained the leader’s motive. She’d already presented the circumstantial evidence, based mostly on his relationship with Castro, which had granted him the cooperation he’d needed for the Americanization training and that the refugee-dump demanded, in addition to Márquez’s potential access to the filo. The motive sealed the case: he had a reason behind his actions, not just the rhetoric he was famous for, and his tale of murder-squad survival gave him the best possible recruiting pitch with fellow victims of regional genocide across the Americas.